Arcadia Burns

AT SEA


THE GAIA WAS CRUISING the Mediterranean with no other vessel in sight. Evening dusk was falling; the first stars appeared in the clear sky. It was still warm, around sixty degrees, and the water reflected the light from the yacht’s portholes.

“What does love mean to you?” asked Rosa.

Alessandro didn’t even have to think about it. “Lying awake at night, realizing I’m going to die sometime—but that doesn’t bother me, because there’ll be someone with me when the time comes.” He glanced sideways at her. “How about you?”

“Honeymooning in the Bronx.”

“Romantic.”

“No, that’s the point. People honeymoon in Paris or Vienna or Florence, so they won’t have time to fight in those first few weeks. There are so many sights to see, so much else to think about. They’re using history to anesthetize the present. But if you really love someone, then you can make do with a couple of weeks in the Bronx. Or Detroit. Or Novosibirsk. That way it’s not all about ancient monuments and museums, it’s just about the other person and yourself. And that’s love.”

They had made themselves comfortable in the seating area on the top deck, and were looking into the flames of two dozen little candle lanterns arranged around the table and the deck itself. In the candlelight, the two blue marks on Rosa’s upper arm left by the needle of the syringe were clearly visible.

They had felt like junkies, injecting each other with the serum last night. But they had stayed in human form for quite a while, and when the transformations finally seemed about to begin, they had risked a second dose.

Alessandro had given himself the serum before, for sporting events and other occasions at his boarding school, and he swore that he had never noticed any side effects. Rosa had been forcibly injected with it twice, so at first she had been nervous. But she had not for a second regretted taking the serum, and she was actually the one who had insisted on the second dose.

Twenty minutes, twice running. In retrospect it seemed to her much longer, and yet not nearly long enough. Her intention of gaining control over her transformations as quickly as possible was even stronger now. She didn’t want to rely on a strange serum, harmless or not. In the old days she had always refused to drink diet soda and energy drinks because of all the toxins they contained. And now here she was injecting herself with some dubious substance, which—if she was right in her assumptions—had been developed by the archenemy of the Arcadians. All the same, she could hardly wait to load up the syringe next time.

Alessandro was barefoot, wearing only washed-out jeans and a pale T-shirt. She liked his feet. The skin over his insteps was the same brown as his chest and his arms. In the candlelight from the lanterns, his body shone like bronze.

Rosa was resting with the back of her head on his lap, letting him push unruly blond strands back from her forehead. He did that often, and very lovingly, but she had only to move and her hair was as untidy as before. Typical, she thought, resigned to it: I can’t even control my own hair.

They had taken the yacht out so they wouldn’t be disturbed. The sofa where they had been lounging around all day was upholstered in the best white leather, and was as showy as everything else on the vessel. Alessandro’s father had fitted the Gaia out with the most expensive finishings, from paneling in African woods in the saloon to gilded faucets in the galley. Alessandro was embarrassed by it. More than once, he had mentioned selling the Gaia. If he didn’t, it was only because of the name of the yacht. His dead mother’s name.

Rosa was wearing a black top and a short skirt. She thought her knees were too red and her calves too pale, but it didn’t seem to bother him. With Alessandro, she felt for the first time that she wasn’t entering some kind of competition. Their families might be rivals, but they weren’t.

He kissed her forehead, the end of her nose, her lips. She put her hand on the back of his neck, drew him down to her again, and held him until neither of them could breathe and they moved apart, laughing.

“Do they still hurt?” He pointed to the blue marks where the needle had gone in.

“I’ll live.”

He made an instinctive sound as she moved away from him and sat cross-legged on the sofa. She watched him as, once again, he gave her the youthful grin that didn’t seem to suit the capo of a Mafia clan. A fresh evening breeze blew her hair in front of her face, and she tried to hold it back with both hands.

There was a buzzing sound. Her cell phone was lying on the table in front of the sofa. The vibration from the ringtone made it circle around the glass surface like a drunk bumblebee.

When she looked at the display, she recognized the number. “The lab. Finally.” Before they had left the palazzo for the coast, Rosa had sent a driver to Enna with a vial from the cellar and what was left of Alessandro’s serum. They must have come up with the results of the tests.

She took the call, as Alessandro expectantly pressed his lips together. A little later she thanked the caller, said the laboratory was to invoice her at the office in Piazza Armerina, and put the cell phone back on the table.

“The same substance,” she said. “Probably still effective, even after all the years it’s been stored down there.”

“Then Tano really was in touch with this Apollonio. Or some other TABULA go-between.” She had told Alessandro that her father had forbidden the attorney to pursue his own inquiries, saying that he would follow the trail of Apollonio himself. She suppressed the thought of that empty tomb as best she could, for now.

“Try as I might, I can’t remember ever hearing the name before,” said Alessandro. “Tano and Cesare talked about many of their business associates, but not an Apollonio…or at least not when I was present.”

“And the people at the lab said something else. The substance is really an antiserum derived from blood. They tried to isolate its components, but they thought there was something wrong with the original blood.”

He looked at her as if trying to estimate just how bad the news about to follow was.

“They can’t classify it as either human or animal blood,” she explained. “Obviously the serum has features of both, different proteins or…or whatever. But the serum we sent them is from a single donor, so it’s not a mixture of several.”

“Sounds impossible,” he said.

“That’s what they thought, too.”

“As long as we’re in human form, everything about us is human, including our blood. And after transformation—”

“Yes, our blood is also animal. One hundred percent.” She nodded slowly. “However, the raw material for the serum came from someone who’s both. Human and animal at the same time.”

Alessandro linked his hands behind his head and leaned back with a groan. “Hybrids.”

Rosa frowned. “Hybrids?”

“Arcadians who stop changing in midtransformation. Half animal, half human.”

“Stop changing?”

“It’s only a rumor. Don’t worry about it.”

Her eyes narrowed. “If that means I’m going to be walking around with a snake’s head someday, then I have plenty to worry about.”

“I was afraid you’d say that.”

“And that’s why you never mentioned it before?”

“Sorry.”

“What else have you kept from me?”

“I haven’t kept anything from you,” he snapped.

“How often does that kind of thing happen?”

“I’ve no idea.”

“Once a month? Once a year? Once in a lifetime?”

“You’re not going to get hysterical, are you?”

She jumped up, almost sweeping one of the candle lanterns off the table. “As if having to change into an animal wasn’t bad enough! And now there’s the risk of ending up as a sideshow act on top of it. The amazing reptile woman.”

“The risk of dying of a perfectly normal cancer someday is probably a hundred times greater. Or a thousand times. How would I know?”

“So what about the blood in the serum?”

He sighed quietly. “Yes, you have a point there.”

“Does TABULA breed these creatures?”

“Why would they do that?”

She went over to the rail and leaned against it. “Why would they capture Arcadians and then skin them? Why would anyone make coats out of the pelts? Damn it, it doesn’t matter why all this happens! Just that it does happen.”

“You think that the experiments carried out by TABULA—and we only know about those from hearsay, right?—led to the creation of hybrids of some kind?”

She took a deep breath and watched him in the light of the flickering candle lanterns. He looked slightly ill. “We don’t know anything for sure, do we? But we have to start somewhere.”

“Start?” He stood up and came over to her. “Is that the plan? Put a stop to the activities of TABULA? Do away with evil? In the Land of Mordor, where the Shadows lie?”

She shook her head. “I couldn’t care less about heroics.”

Alessandro smiled. “Because strictly speaking, we represent evil, right?”

“What’s TABULA, then?”

“Maybe just a specter thought up by men like Cesare to justify what they do. A phantom image of the enemy. Just an excuse to behave even worse than the others.”

She held his gaze, felt for his hands. “Is that what you really think?”

“I don’t know what to think anymore.”

“I want to know what Costanza was up to. And what became of my father. All the things that have to do with me.”

With us, said his eyes.

“With us,” she whispered.